Beyond Minimalism Didactic Secularisation in De Veritate
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Grotiana 35 (2014) 119-157 GROTIAN A brill.com/grot Beyond Minimalism Didactic Secularisation in De Veritate Mark Somos Research Fellow, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Affiliate Scholar, The Tobin Project; Senior Visiting Research Fellow, Sussex Law School [email protected] Abstract This paper offers an interpretation of De veritate that resolves its ostensible self- contradictions and uncovers its coherence when it is read as a text designed primarily with an irenic purpose, a didactic method, and having a secularising effect regardless of the author’s intention. The article has seven sections: (1) Introduction; (2) Proofs of Religious Truth (Standards of good religion: ethics, rewards, and the violence of conquest; Testimony and consensus; Miracles; Oracles and prophecies; Simplicity); (3) Religious Practice (Ceremonies and rites; Sacrifices; Adiaphora); (4) Distinctive Christian Truths (The Trinity; Jesus Christ; Son of God, Son of Man; Death, Resurrection, and Ascension; Free will; Immortality; Doctrinal omissions); (5) Proofs from Providential History (The Bible’s textual integrity; The spread of Christianity; The early Church and the Bible), (6) Aspects of Reception; and (7) Conclusion: Christianity according to De veritate (Summary of findings; Thesis 1: Secularising legalism; Thesis 2: Didactic secularisation). Keywords De veritate – secularisation – law and religion – minimalism – rhetoric of irenicism * Research for this paper began in Berlin, Germany and ended in San Marino ca, usa. Many thanks to the program Rechtskulturen: Confrontations beyond Comparison, an initiative of the Berlin Research Network Recht im Kontext (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin) at the Forum Transregionale Studien, and to the Sacred and Secular Revolutions program of The Huntington Library and the Jack Miller Center, for generous support. The author is grateful to Hans Blom, Ioannis Evrigenis, Marketa Klicova and Dániel Margócsy for their comments on various drafts. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/18760759-03501004 <UN> 120 Somos … ach Heer – het is te Loevestein gemaakt. ∵ Introduction Readers of De veritate seldom miss one or more oddities and apparent self- contradictions in Grotius’s arguments for the truth of Christianity. As shown in this volume, the contemporary reception and eighteenth-century afterlife of De veritate was remarkably contentious. Among recent readers, Heering and Klein point out the absence of Creation and the Trinity from the list of Christian doctrines to be proved, in contrast, for instance, with Mornay’s De veritate or Grotius’s own Meletius.1 Günther Lottes describes Grotius’s arguments as ‘gar- bled,’ ‘verging on the ridiculous,’ and unwittingly weakening his own argu- ments.2 Here, it is the ‘unwittingly’ part of this acute assessment that I wish to dispute. A systematic survey of the positive doctrinal content of Christianity that Grotius offers suggests that these oddities and self-contradictions are neither isolated, nor accidental. Instead of reducing Christianity to minimal tenets accessible to all reasonable men, including Jews, Muslims, and polytheists, Grotius subverts the reasonability of every core Christian doctrine. A possible explanation is that De veritate was designed to gradually lead readers away from an expectation of reasonable proofs to sola fide in a minimal set of Christian doctrines, to which standards of human reason cannot apply. This rhetorical strategy, and the legal genre of the work, are two reasons why De veritate does not readily fit into the mainstream of Christian apologetics, and exerts an ultimately secularising effect. 1 J.P. Heering, Hugo Grotius as Apologist for the Christian Religion: A Study of His Work De veri- tate religionis christianae (1640) (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 102–3. Dietrich Klein, ‘Hugo Grotius’s Position on Islam as Described in De veritate religionis Christianae, Liber vi,’ in ed. by Martin Mulsow and Jan Rohls, Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 149–73, at p. 159. 2 See G. Lottes, ‘The Transformation of Apologetical Literature in the Early Enlightenment’, infra. Grotiana 35 (2014) 119-157 <UN> Beyond Minimalism 121 In the next four sections I will outline the ways in which Grotius imple- ments this strategy in De veritate by examining what he regards as proofs of religious truth, how religious practice is evaluated, how to settle contentious dogmatic issues, and how to reconcile Providence with politics and free will. A shorter section on the insights we can glean from De veritate’s reception pre- cedes the conclusion, where several explanations for Grotius’s strategy are explored. Proofs of Religious Truth Standards of Good Religion: Ethics, Rewards, and the Violence of Conquest Grotius posits two criteria for a good religion: ethical rules for life, and the promise of reward.3 Christianity, unlike paganism or Judaism, meets both con- ditions, and adds to them the persuasive power of miracles.4 Turning moral goodness into a pre-religion standard against which Judaism, Islam, paganism and Christianity can be measured, and choosing individual reward as the other criterion, already carry secularising implications. Gone for now is the idea that human nature, reason, the love of God, God’s free gift, or a combination of these, constitute the necessary and sufficient cause of true faith, and that the self-serving expectation of rewards is dispensable. 3 Grotius, De veritate religionis christianae (2nd ed., Leiden, 1629), iv.149–50, translated in Symon Patrick, The truth of Christian Religion: In Six Books Written in Latin by Hugo Grotius… (London, 1689), IV.ix.120. Unless indicated otherwise, references are to the 1629 second edi- tion, followed by the corresponding page numbers in this English translation. On Patrick, see J. van den Berg, ‘Between Platonism and Enlightenment. Simon Patrick (1625–1707) and his Place in the Latitudinarian Movement,’ in: J. van den Berg, Religious Currents and Cross- Currents: Essays on Early Modern Protestantism and the Protestant Enlightenment, ed. by J. de Bruijn, P. Holtrop, E. van der Wall (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 133–48. Note that in the 1629 ed., iv.139, Grotius states that prayers to evil spirits are useless, because their worshippers cannot be certain that the evil spirits will deliver. This strikingly mercenary account of reli- gion makes no reference to the comparative morality of Christianity and that of evil spirit- worship; only to rewards. Other editions are referenced when the reader may benefit from tracing the connection between a different edition and political or intellectual events (such as Counter-Remonstrant criticisms, or the presence or absence of an argument in the 1627 first edition) or in the case of relevant textual changes, including Grotius’s own revisions, commentaries and annota- tions by editors, such as Jean Leclerc (1657–1736), and similar edition-specific features. 4 1629 ed., v.196, mispaginated as 146, V.xviii.157; and 1689 tr., v.211–2, v.xxiii.168. Grotiana 35 (2014) 119-157 <UN> 122 Somos If my main thesis is true, and this shift of emphasis to self-interest serves an overarching didactic purpose, Grotius’s choices still remain striking. Among the well-established apologetic traditions one he discards is that miracles have ceased with Christ precisely because for true believers faith must outweigh the attraction of rewards. An alternative onus probandi in early modern Protestant theology invoked both ot and nt language on the circumcision of the heart, and the laws written in man’s conscience. On the rare occasion when Grotius does invoke this standard of proof in De veritate, his legal analogy is to a king who replaces sundry laws with a common legal system for the sake of uniform government.5 Even here, Grotius interprets the law written in men’s minds, according i.a. to Jer. 31:31, as a positive divine law, not a natural law discoverable by all.6 The law written in all hearts serves in De veritate not as a proof of Christianity, but as a doctrine dependent on demonstrating the truth of Christianity by other means. Pacifism or bellicosity is an important litmus test of a religion’s ethical value. Islam, ancient Greece and Rome are found wanting,7 allowing Grotius to pres- ent pacifism – as well as monogamy – among the exclusive proofs of the truth of Christianity.8 The section on the spread of Christianity below will show how Grotius comprehensively subverts this claim by building a contradictory pic- ture of the worldly triumph of Christianity that closely follows his repeated condemnations of Islam for the violence of its expansion, proving its untruth as a religion.9 In sum, even if boiling the truth of Christianity down to ethics and reward was unproblematic, De veritate would still need not only close analysis, but also radical re-evaluation. Testimony and Consensus Grotius subscribed to the Aristotelian distinction between different types of evidence, and the necessity of matching them to the subject matter. Ethics may not be susceptible to the same type of proof as geometry – although uni- versal consensus on an ethical subject, should it ever occur, may come close to 5 See also 1629 ed., v.168, or V.vii.310 in the 1675 Amsterdam edition: in creating universally binding laws Christ abrogated Mosaic laws, which applied only to Jews, the same way a king abolishes municipal statutes. Borrowing later from Tacitus, Grotius uses the same analogy to explain epistemic humility: just as it is perilous to inquire into kings’ counsel, so it is unwise to conjecture into God’s meaning. 1675 ed., III.xii.221–2. 6 1629 ed., v.170–1; 1689 tr., V.vii.137–8. See also Jesus acquiring regal potestas, including the authority to make law: 1629 ed., V.167; 1675 ed., V.vii.308; 1689 tr., V.vii.135. 7 1689 tr., II.xiv. 8 1689 tr., II.xv. 9 Later restatements of Islam’s violence are at the beginning of Book VI, and also VI.vii.